


Mirror Mirror

by Shayvaalski



Series: The Kids Are Alright [19]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M, bad brains, moran family values
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 03:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15258765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayvaalski/pseuds/Shayvaalski
Summary: Eurus—who is as pale and strong as him—catches her breath, and rolls her skull on her neck, and squeezes.





	Mirror Mirror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [srrrevans (schmirius)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmirius/gifts).



> For srrrevans, who asked.

When the East Wind folds her fingers against his hand Sherlock nearly falls to earth; and then his knees lock and he stands, lost in the press of palm to palm. Eurus—who is as pale and strong as him—catches her breath, and rolls her skull on her neck, and squeezes. 

Sherlock cannot breathe.

 

This is what Jim knows, like a kick to the belly, the instant he sees her:  _this is what to him Holmes should have been._ There has always been something missing, in the elder, in the younger, and he has found it, here, in the baby of the family (there had been three of him once, too, running wild in the countryside, and there is a world, there is a story where he is the one standing all in white in a prison made of glass—not this world, not this story) and her dark, dark hair. 

He wants, desperately, to touch her.

 

Siobhan is in her late forties and looking at her mother's friend is like looking at her mother. They meet each other's eyes over the coffin and Siobhan thinks she might be sick; and it is only Tommy's hands sudden and hard and brutal on her shoulders that keeps her in her body. She twists, agonized, already feeling ( _how much? too much. can you bear it?)_ overwhelmed by everything that is happening. Aunt Irene reaches around Rosie, standing at her side, and grips Siobhan's wrist, nails digging in, hidden by Sherlock's daughter's body. 

Across the grave the woman twists too. Like in a mirror. 

 

 

\---

 

 

"Boss," Tommy says, and it is just the barest whisper of sound in her ear but it makes her able to look away and refocus; it hurts, to hear her father's name for her mother, but it is also the only way things can be, now. And it reminds her, also, of her father; of Sebastian on her left, looking at at the open grave before them, his broad shoulders as broad as they've ever been, and unbroken. They both knew this was coming. That this has always been coming.

Siobhan puts the woman out of her mind. "Da?" she says, and Sebastian takes a long, smooth breath that does not shake at all.

"Alright, Bhan?" 

"Not particularly." She lets her mouth flicker into a parody of a smile; Jim's smile. "Better than some." 

He snorts, and jostles her a little, the same familiar careful touching he has used with her all her life. Then, so that others can hear, "Anything to say?"

Siobhan looks down at the coffin. 

"Everything I am," she says at last, "he was. Without him—" she looks up, into light blue eyes she does not know, that in some ways she knows too well "—I wouldn't have known. He was—"

_He was my mother._

"—himself."

 

He steps forward. So does she. He wonders if Sherlock knows. It is perhaps two yards to the line on the floor; perhaps three to the glass. Jim notices without noticing himself doing so that she has positioned herself that same three yards back, so that they take the same number of steps. The same length of stride. 

Her feet are  _bare_.   
It is almost appallingly intimate. He cannot help himself and neither can she, and both of them are at the glass, and her chin  _lifts_ , and her pupils are blown, and he echoes her without thinking.

When she inhales Jim can hear it. Can feel the breath in his own lungs. He is giddy with it. With her. 

"Holmes," he says, the slightest drawl of sound. 

" _Eurus_ ," she corrects, and smiles.

It is his smile. 

 

It takes everything Sherlock has not to go to his knees. He does not remember her. He  _does_  remember her. He remembers a dog in a well, in water. He remembers long hair whipping into her mouth. He does not remember the color of her eyes, even as they stare into his. 

"Hello, you," she says, very soft, except it's all wrong, because she sounds like they're meeting on the street again, unbothered, fond. "I'd call you big brother, but Mike has that rather locked down, doesn't he?" 

Her fingers, linked in with his, are familiar as his own. The nails, bitten down, the knuckles a little too big. Another squeeze. Another catch of breath in both their throats. 

 

 

\---

 

 

When Eurus hits him he can taste his childhood. Seawater and blood and smoke. He goes down hard, and remembers how to scream. 

 

For the first time in his life he is in  _love._ Later, at home, Sebastian will roll his eyes, insulted, upstaged, but for now there is just Holmes the Youngest, black hair and open mouth. Her eyes are a little sunken, hooded just like his. He rocks, and this time she echoes him, moving to his left, then his right, sinuous as snakes, the best they can do, the closest they can get to  _touch._

It isn't sex. Jim knows this as well as he knows the little sideways twist of her chin, the twitch of her fingers towards him. It's something else. Deeper and more terrible. 

His thumbnail brushes glass. 

 

The handful of dirt hits the coffin and Siobhan turns away. Tommy follows her, because Tommy always follows her; away from her family, away from Rosie with her fists shoved into her pockets, awkward and unsure, away from the grave. There had been a priest, a man with a Moriarty look to him she doesn't question, and a proper service, and that's over now, and mum is gone.

Parallel to her, fifteen yards away, is a woman like a mirror, stride exactly just her length. But no tall blond man trails her. 

"Wait here," says Siobhan. Tommy starts to makes an objection, deep in his throat, and she snaps, "I said  _wait here."_

He waits. She walks. Not parallel. Converging. 

 

 

\--

 

 

"You're very like him," the woman says, no prelude. Siobhan is only just close enough that she does not have to shout, and says nothing in reply until they are standing near a gravestone with no name, very close now. They face each other. When Siobhan rolls her head on her neck, restless, the woman rolls hers too. 

"I know."

"May I?" 

Siobhan nods, stiff; long fingers touch and raise her chin. The woman's eyes are still too blue, but otherwise they are Jim's. There's a long hissed-in breath, which Siobhan realizes, after a moment, comes from her. Being touched is hard, even by her mum. 

"I never thought," the woman says, musing, "to have a child. Too much work and no reward. I was wrong." She smiles. Impossibly, it is his smile _. "_ Clever man, your mother." 

"Da said you were his friend."

"In a manner of speaking." Her hand drops away. "We only met the once, in person, but  _oh_ , pet, no woman could have loved him more or known him better." She tips her head to one side. Siobhan's gut clenches, surges, and again there is that feeling like she is going to be sick, and this time there is no Tommy with his fingers digging into her bones. She wants, and she does not want, and there is violence all through her body. "Except perhaps one. He sent me his books, after."

"Who are you?" 

  

Eurus presses her palm against the glass. Jim, his fingers a little curled, mirrors her, until they are separated only by the thickness of a single pane. He has lived his entire  _life_  ignorant of this, of her, and how dare they keep this from him—how dare they expect he can be content with Sherlock, when he can feel the heave of his sister's chest in his mouth? 

She moves just a little closer. They are the same beast in two bodies. How could they be otherwise?

 

Sherlock curls into a ball, his spine a child's spine again, flexible and protective and ready to be struck. She screams back, hunched over him, bent nearly in half, fingertips against the floor for balance—

 

 

\---

 

 

—and where is their brother? Where is Mycroft, dragging her away? 

  

"Eurus, then," he says at last, and is rewarded—that roll of the neck, the way her mouth drops a little open as she pants. It could be laughter. They are going to  _ruin_  Sherlock, and oh, won't it be sweet. Nobody hates like a little sister can, and nobody destroys like Jim. 

  

Tommy is heading towards them, purposeful; behind her their dad, his eyes fixed on Siobhan, mouth set in a thin, tired line. The woman tips her head to one side. Without Tommy's grip to stop her, Siobhan rocks forward, balanced as a mongoose or a snake. Jim is still inside her, blood and bone. And again the woman smiles. 

 

 

\---

 

  

"Eurus Holmes," she says. 

 

 "...and you're  _Jim_. There. First-name basis already." 

 

And the East Wind blows. 

**Author's Note:**

> This stands slightly apart from the other Siobhan fics, as evidenced by Rosie and by Eurus herself, who doesn't really exist in the normal Moran Family Values canon. But it's true to Siobhan.


End file.
